Many of you, upon entering the hangar today, must have seen a new message, notifying you of a birthday for one of your planes. This is a new feature that we’ve added to World of Warplanes.

From now on, every Tier II+ plane that you own can celebrate its birthday one, three, six, nine and every following full year after its purchase. When the time comes, players will be able to receive birthday gifts – provided they complete the associated birthday missions that come with the feature. However, don’t worry that these missions will be too complicated. In fact, they’ll be very easy to solve and you won’t need too much preparation or time to complete them. Most of the time, all you’ll have to do is to fly on your birthday plane and win on it once in battle.

The higher the tier and ‘age’ of your aircraft, the bigger the birthday gift it will receive. For example: The reward for a one-month-birthday of a Tier II plane is 400 free XP upon its first victory. For a plane of Tier X the birthday gift is significantly bigger: 6,000 free XP. After three months, players will get double XP on their birthday plane for a number of battles. The higher the Tier of the aircraft, the longer the bonus lasts. The six month birthday gift will give you a double income boost for credits. At nine months, you’ll get a triple bonus for credits and XP! The most precious rewards await after one year (and each following year) of service: birthday emblems, additional free XP for victories and for Tier X planes even as much as up to five days of Premium Account!

Let’s look at the finer nuances of the feature:

The special ‚Birthday Missions‘ will be accessible in the regular battle mission window with the other assignments of the moment. It is there that you’ll be able to see upcoming birthday missions too. Once the time comes, a special pop-up window will notify you of the birthday of one of your planes. Finally, your birthday planes will be marked accordingly with a little icon in the aircraft carousel at the bottom of your screen in the hangar.

You will have seven days after your plane’s birthday to complete its associated birthday mission and collect its reward. Past that point, the mission and reward disappear. The only exceptions are the special emblems for one-year-birthdays. They will be credited to your birthday planes upon your first login after the celebration date, regardless of whether you’ve actually flown the birthday plane during its seven-day-birthday or not.

The anniversaries are being counted not in weeks but in days (30, 90, 180 days etc.). The beginning for the count is always the last date of purchase of a particular aircraft. If you bought, sold and re-bought a plane, it will be the last purchase date that will count towards its next birthday. Nonetheless, the type of birthday will carry over from previous version of the same plane that you owned to the current one. For example: If you bought a plane on January 1st, sold it later and then bought it again on March 1st, then its next birthday will be the 3-months one, happening on May 29th.

We want to also take a moment to right away address some of our veterans, who have managed to amass dozens of aircraft in their well-equipped hangars already a long time ago: Many of you will have bought your trusted warbirds over a year ago, which is why the system only gave you their corresponding birthday emblem but not the associated birthday mission, which would have contained another prize. This happened not only to you, but to everybody in this situation, including us. One of the main goals of the Plane Birthday feature is to encourage players to unlock new planes in order to rise up in the tech trees where stronger and faster planes await. Granting the supplementary birthday gifts to players, who have many dozens of planes in their hangar for more than a year at once, would have significantly disturbed the in-game economy. Therefore, you will only be able to receive all birthday missions (and their connected gifts) for planes that will celebrate birthdays from today going forward and not those that have been in your hangar for the longest time.